Clay Benning, resident sound designer for the past 11 years uses Dante Virtual Soundcard and a Dante-MY16-AUD card for productions on the Alliance Stage and on the smaller Hertz Stage. Using the Dante Virtual Soundcard he can now bypass a FireWire connection, using Ethernet instead, which future-proofs the solution and in turn saves money in the long run.
The Alliance's setup includes an Apple Mac Mini, running DVS and Figure 53's Qlab v2 software, and the Dante-MY 16-AUD in a Yamaha DM100. Using DVS, Benning is able to rout the audio outputs from Qlab directly to the inputs of the DM1000, with no external audio interface required. In addition, Benning uses another copy of DVS on his laptop during production periods to route audio directly from Logic into the sound system, streamlining the design and composition process.
The Alliance can now send audio over the network digitally instead of over analogue cables.
"What's great about Dante ," says Benning, "is that it allows me to use Qlab integrated with the DM1000 and a MY 16 card without anything in-between. It reduces my cabling, setup time, and overall costs. Now I can buy less equipment, with better quality, and save tons of time because I have fewer configuration and driver issues to deal with. This makes doing my job easier and I get a far superior design process, and therefore, end result."
(Jim Evans)
